The Final Cut

by Steven Suttie

  The simple reason that no DWP high-earners were trying to calm the ship, or reassure their staff, was because they wanted absolutely no part in this unfolding calamity. The Universal Credit, the benefit cuts, the sanctions, the disability capability reviews, the complete and utter shambles that had been the “benefit reform” was the government’s baby. All of the nasty, unnecessary policies that were allegedly the motivation for these attacks had come from central government.

  As far as the DWP top-tier of managers were concerned, there was absolutely no way that any of their careers were being de-railed because of this. The DWP message may have been silent internally, but one office was hearing the message loud and clear, the government’s cabinet office. To the ministers, the message was deafening. “This was your creation, and it’s your mess, and ultimately, it’s your problem. Deal with it.”

  *****

  Part of the trick that had been pulled in turning the nation against the poor was the demonization of council house tenants. Most of the UK’s council housing stock was built in the years following the second world war. Hundreds of thousands of smart new council homes were built, the mantra at the time was “homes for heroes” as the government looked for new ways to create jobs, create affordable, good quality housing, and of course, provide nice new homes for the British people, as the old Victorian slums were cleared.

  Council homes were, and still are, extremely good earners. They have all paid for themselves dozens of times over, and they provide excellent, self-sustaining income to their local councils. There is not a Town Hall in the land that would say that the local council estate wasn’t a nice little earner. The vast majority of people who live in council housing are nice, decent, hard-working folk who go out to work and keep themselves to themselves, watch Strictly or X-Factor on Saturday night, and try and get away for a fortnight every summer, just like everybody else in the UK.

  But as part of the war on the poor, the TV shows which incensed tax-payers about “their tax” going towards ciggies, tattoos, and 52” plasmas for the “lazy bastards,” also set their sights on council tenants, tarnishing them with the same brush.

  In historical terms, this is a very new thing, a brand new phenomenon, where factions of the UK media has tried to shame council tenants about the fact that they live in a council property. It began in London, where TV crews and newspaper columnists would show work-less families living in rented council accommodation, pointing out that young professional families were paying two thousand pounds a month in rent, for a place that wasn’t as big or as nice. And these “scroungers” were living in better accommodation, and it wasn’t fair.

  In a relatively short time, between 1979 and today, the housing system has changed. At the end of the seventies, 42% of the population lived in a council house. Today, that figure is only 8%. Of those 8%, there are undeniable instances of “out-of-control” people who blight their local communities. But in the main, the media have succeeded in convincing the other 92% of people in Britain that council house tenants are up to no good.

  Using rare examples of individuals who trash their homes, create anti-social problems, and who live chaotic, troubled lives, the establishment has managed to tar all council tenants with the same brush. It was utterly ridiculous, in precisely the same way that suggesting all British 1980’s TV personalities were child molesters, would have been.

  But, if you repeat a lie enough times, it becomes the truth. And as the UK struggles to find enough housing for its growing, ageing population, the fact is that millions more council homes will have to be built. Whether the UK’s media will demonise all of the future tenants as they do today’s tenants remains to be seen. But no other policy highlights and illuminates the government’s complete and utter contempt for the poor than the “bedroom tax.”

  This policy was, in theory, a way of making better use of council housing stock. The stock was in short supply, as a result of the 1980’s policy of selling the council houses off at discounted prices to tenants, in the biggest pre-election voter bribe that the world has ever seen. It won Thatcher another term in office, but it also wiped out the nation’s council housing stock practically overnight as tenants bought their council property for a fraction of the market cost.

  No more council houses were built, at least not in any serious numbers. The resulting demand on council housing waiting lists became overwhelming, and a new industry was born. Buy-to-let properties, where private landlords bought up streets and streets of run-down properties in the worst areas of town, in many cases from as little as £500 per house.

  The “Victorian slum clearance” had gone full circle. There were some of these dilapidated houses which were sold for just £1 each, because of the amount of work which was needed to make the property fit for human inhabitation again. These new landlords were delighted with the deal. They could offer sub-standard houses to the local councils to rehome people into, for astronomically inflated rates, and without the restrictions of the usual rules and regulations which went with a secure council tenancy.

  It was yet another win for the richest, and another blow for the poorest in society. The Tory idea to sell off the council houses, in order to gain working-class votes was the gift that kept on giving, and the fact that a third of the nation’s MPs are private landlords today, and that 309 Conservative MPs voted against the “fit for human habitation bill” lays testament to this fact.

  In 2010, the nation was waking up to the fact that it was facing a council-house shortage and consequently, the bedroom tax idea was born. The idea was simple enough. If you are on benefits, and you have bedrooms that you don’t use, you would now have to pay an extra subsidy on each room. This meant that a sixty-two-year old woman living by herself in a three-bed house was now facing an extra forty pounds a week cost. The idea was that she would surrender the big house and move into a one-bedroom property.

  The basic theory made sense. But there was a problem. There were no one-bedroom little properties available. There were just hundreds of thousands of poor people in big houses, being charged a ridiculous subsidy on spare rooms. There was no alternative accommodation for them to move to, they just had to stay put, and pay the extra subsidy, whilst the government blissfully ignored the gargantuan flaw in their plan.

  Rather than show some humility, hold their hands up and admit that they’d got it wrong, they simply lied and lied about what a great success it had been, and carried on regardless. This policy was just another example of how disgracefully the government have treated the poor since 2010.

  The roll out of the Universal Credit was said to be the “box-set” of benefits, a new simpler, easier to navigate system for the most-needy in British society. The small print however, is that from the date of registering for Universal Credit, which would cover unemployment, or disability, or income support, an applicant will automatically wait six weeks until their first payment.

  Not only is that impossible to sustain human life, but it is also negative in trying to find rented accommodation as no landlord is prepared to wait six weeks until the first payment. As though this was all part of a sick joke, the government set up a phone number for Universal Credit applicants in need of an emergency payment, which costs 55 pence per minute to call. It all seemed like a very sinister, dark, satire sketch show based around rich people being deliberately cruel to poor people.

  Sadly, this was no sketch show. This was the reality of life for millions of poor people, whose crime in the eyes of the state, was to be born with nothing.

  Now, after seven years of this sustained, unforgiving and wholly unchristian attack against them, it was becoming clear that somebody out there had snapped. Somebody, somewhere, had had enough, and was kicking back. Whoever that person was, it seemed that he was so desperate to highlight the injustice of the war on the poor, that he was prepared to seriously maim the people who were at the coal-face of delivering the government’s hatred.

  This was a deplorable way of trying to attract
support for a campaign, and even to those who had the greatest sympathy for the appalling way that the British poor were being treated, there was an insurmountable sense of disgust and anger about the attacks, and a steely determination that the perpetrator of these sadistic, cold-blooded crimes was not going to achieve anything by this, come-what-may.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Behind the shiny, famous black door of Number 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister was chairing a cabinet meeting. The cabinet is the boring, old-fashioned name for the senior ministers of office. These people are considered the greatest minds in the land. Admittedly, that’s only by themselves and their handful of ambitious hangers-on in the “Westminster Bubble.”

  None-the-less, they genuinely believe that they are the nation’s most important people. The depressing reality is that this Cabinet room full of landed gentry millionaires, are the most ill-informed and out-of-touch members of society. Not a single one of them would know to buy the most expensive sandwich in order to make a supermarket “meal-deal” worthwhile.

  But sadly, the privately-educated, born-rich people in this room who had never had a real job, were the people who made the very biggest, and most serious decisions that affect the British population. They are the people who are ordered to meet up at short notice to make it look as if they are doing something whenever something bad happens in the UK.

  Today’s cabinet meeting was being chaired by the PM, who was making the most of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions’ attendance. It was the born-millionaire Ian David Smythe who had been the architect of the welfare reforms. He was the shiny headed face of the government’s zero tolerance approach to poor people. The great irony was that he looked like quite a nice, compassionate man. He was shaking quite considerably, as the cabinet ministers and senior officials grilled him about the DWP’s policies, and tried to get him to find a solution to this absolute PR disaster which was unfolding, quite unexpectedly.

  “Quite simply,” said the PM, in a typically cold, robotic voice, “somebody is going to have to carry the can for this. The way that the press are portraying us, is quite preposterous, and we need to adopt a damage limitation strategy, as we announce our plans to combat this threat.” The PM, renowned for being cold and heartless, looked every bit the part today.

  “But Prime Minister, with all due respect,” said Ian David Smythe, his voice uncharacteristically squeaky today, was pleading, “the police are dealing with the matter. The man responsible will be apprehended at any moment. I implore you, can we please just wait a little while longer?”

  The PM did not make eye-contact with anybody. “The press are having a great time highlighting some of our most controversial policies. The longer this goes on for, the greater the damage will be done on our stronger society portfolio. I must make this abundantly clear, when this meeting is over, we must offer something to the press which will make this heartless Tory rhetoric disappear.”

  “Am I being told, or asked, to resign?” asked the distraught looking politician.

  “You are being informed that you need to come up with something that will make this go away. If you want to fall on your sword, that’s your decision. However, your replacement will only inherit the same policies that are causing so much consternation.”

  “Prime Minister, are you telling me that I have to do a U-turn on the Welfare Reforms Bill?”

  “I did not say that. But you could prune it. You could remove the most toxic parts, such as the bedroom tax, the automatic disability assessment fails, the pressure on Jobcentre staff to sanction as many people as they can.”

  Ian David Smythe looked crest-fallen. This was a major humiliation, in this crowded cabinet room full of peers and colleagues. He had dreamt of reforming the welfare state for over twenty years. And here, in this packed room, he was being told to either dismantle it, or resign.

  “And all this, because of one maniac with an axe?”

  “No Ian. All this because we need to manage the public perception of our brand. Each hour of this poor-bashing talk is losing us votes with the swing voters. So, is it the policy, or is it you that is being axed? No pun intended.”

  There was a roar of laughter around the cabinet office. That was a good one.

  Another minister spoke, once the humour had died down a little. It was the plummy, educated accent of the born-millionaire, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Farley Rees Grosvenor. He was the man in charge of the nation’s bank account.

  “If I may, Prime Minister, I wish to advise caution. The public will see this as a knee-jerk reaction, and they’ll assume that we don’t really have any principles, if we announce a panicky u-turn.”

  “Here here!” said several voices in the room.

  “I might add, that if we are seen to be so weak in the face of a single mad man’s behaviour about one of our policies, we are in danger of placing ourselves in double-jeopardy with the rest of our unpopular policies.”

  “Quite right!” shouted another Ox-Bridge accent. “Some lunatic would try and save the NHS by shooting nurses!”

  There was another great roar of laughter around the room, even the PM gave a wry smile. Once the noise and humour died down a little, the Chancellor continued.

  “My advice would be to reassure the public that all efforts are being made to arrest the culprit, and use the opportunity to rubbish the ‘heartless’ rhetoric, by inserting a sound-bite about how successful the Welfare Reforms have been.”

  “Yes, that’s a great idea, thank you,” said Ian David Smythe, looking and sounding like a man who’d been offered a stay of execution.

  “There is only one problem with that strategy, however,” said the PM. All of the ministers looked up at their boss. “There are no positive sound-bites about what a success the Welfare Reform has been, because it has been a complete and utter farce from the very first instance!”

  “It’s okay, Prime Minister, we’ll make something up.” Suggested the PR consultant.

  “We need to offer a positive angle,” suggested the Deputy Prime Minister, who was also born a millionaire. “We could say that our Welfare Reforms have been responsible for the deaths of forty-thousand scroungers, so far!”

  The response received another huge wave of laughter. These people were really enjoying themselves, and thoughts of the injured DWP staff, who were paying the ultimate cost for having no alternative but to implement these cruel policies, couldn’t be further from their minds.

  “Okay, well let’s make this as tidy as possible.” The PM looked across at the Defence Minister. “What are we going to announce as our improved security procedures for DWP sites in the interim?”

  “We have called on our troops to take up emergency strategic security activities outside all DWP buildings throughout the United Kingdom during operational hours, with the major emphasis on the safe entry and exiting of all DWP employees. As you will no doubt realise, this is a huge undertaking, involving twelve-thousand troops, looking after the security of over one thousand locations, which as we are all fully aware, contain some eighty-five thousand employees.”

  “And, what do we anticipate to be the overall cost of this exercise?” The Chancellor looked aghast at the announcement.

  “I don’t have the final figure, but I believe the sum will be significant.”

  “Probably more than the actual savings that the Benefit Reforms were designed to make?” The PM had a cold, steely glare.

  “Significantly.”

  “And here-in lies our next PR disaster, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “We’ll get the first spin, don’t worry,” said the communications director out of the side of his mouth.

  “You’d better. We can’t afford any more catastrophes. We’re responsible for the biggest crisis since World War Two with this Brexit calamity, and our austerity brainwave has crippled all of our public services. We really cannot afford to step another foot wrong, because it’s beginning to look like the public aren’t actually as stupid
as we originally anticipated.”

  *****

  The media were informed that a major announcement was to be made outside Number 10 Downing Street at 5pm. This was a very big, and long overdue development in the story, and to be fair, it had been forced by the media.

  The TV news, radio talk-shows and newspaper hacks and editors had been constantly hounding the press office, demanding to know what steps were being taken to protect their 85,000 DWP employees. The stories of Kath’s, Jason’s and Gary’s injuries were horrific enough, but with the press involved as well, this had now become the biggest crisis on the government’s ever expanding list of self-made disasters.

  The Number 10 “exterior” press conferences were a relatively new thing, and were generally only staged when a story of major significance needed to be seen as the government’s top priority.

  At one minute to five, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions came striding out of Number 10 and stepped confidently towards the lectern.

  “Good afternoon.” Ian David Smythe looked for a camera to train his eyes on as he read out the much-anticipated statement.

  “Today the cabinet have met to discuss the appalling crimes which have shocked and saddened us all, in Manchester. Firstly, I would like to send our sincerest condolences to our government colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions, who have been attacked, and I want to say that we wish them well with the difficult weeks and months of rehabilitation that they now face, going forwards. This is a despicable and cowardly act, and it is being carried out by an individual who obviously does not understand the role of our DWP colleagues, nor does he understand the excellent work that they do for their clients, and for society in general.”

  Smythe paused and stared down the lens of the Sky News camera. He wanted that last line to resonate with the attacker, but more-so, with the public.